Saturday, December 22, 2012

My Space Classics: Internet Archeology for Buffy fans

This was also pre-2008, but I came up with this because of he tenth anniversary of Buffy as a TV show. Somewhere on the Internet, there are the ruins of websites gone by...

In the world wide web, as it was once called, there are literally billions of web pages that have been forgotten. They now float in cyberspace, never to be logged on again.
However, I just discovered a way to see these long-forgotten pages again. It's at archive.org, where you can see lots of long-forgotten clips of movies school films, TV shows and lots of other filmed things. They also has something called the Internet Wayback. With this, you can call up a long-forgotten web address, and see if it still exists. If so, you can see how much of it still exists. Now, if you find such a page, you will se it's missing images and graphics. it would be like visiting an old Greek or Roman ruin, or what was left of Illyria's army in the "Shells" episode from Angel.
For example, remember buffyslayer.com? That was the original web address for Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it was on the WB. It included a link to the original Bronze, the history-making watering hole where Whedonistas gathered. I entered that address to the Internet Wayback, and got a hit. It was what was left of the page from December 1997, around season two. There's no graphics, but there is a link to the Bronze. Click that, it's really going back in time. Again, no graphics, but lots of info about Slayspeak, the cast, music, and a link to the posting board. Click that link, and you see what people were taking about in February 1998.

Yes, the file did say the home page was from December 1997, but the Bronze back then is from February 1998, just before the pivotal episodes when Angel lost his soul and we lost our minds.
AND...for good measure...there's a sample of the posts from the first week of the show.

Man, seeing the reaction from an unsuspecting world shows how more and more special this show really is. It may not have had major Emmys, but it's inspired a long list of Ph.D dissertations.
Now, I also clicked buffy.com in the Internet Wayback, and got even more pages, especially from the UPN days. The big difference here is that a lot of pages form that webpage are still mostly intact, especially around 2003.
Now the old webpages for Firefly and Wonderfalls weren't so lucky. While there are links to buying them on DVD, there's nothing left of the program links.
Of course, taking the Internet Wayback works for lots of other websites, too...especially the more popular ones. You can see early webpages from Google and Yahoo.
Anyway, it's a chance for Buffy fans to really go back in time, one old webpage at a time. Try it!
Better yet, see if your own webpage is somehow in the Internet Wayback. I tried it..and it is!